The Vanishing Shadow (1934)

Starring Onslow Stevens, Ada Ince, Walter Miller, James Durkin, Richard Cramer
Directed by Lew Landers
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

An electrical engineer recruits a noted scientist to help him develop a vanishing ray, while the longtime nemesis of his father tries to steal his stock in a local newspaper.

A Universal movie serial, and a very good one, with exceptional special effects, and some unique story and character ideas, I became very enamored of this production, as it's quite different from a lot of serial fare.  Lew Landers, a year before the release of The Raven, is like on that film, credited as Louis Friedlander, and really does a fine job as director.  Stevens and Ince are capable leads, Cramer is memorable as industrial Walter Miller's chief henchman, and Durkin, the scientist who assists Stevens, although noble for the most part, has the character flaw of wanting to kill all of Stevens' enemies with the dangerous devices he's invented.  The devices are efficiently rendered by Universal's special effects department, who aren't credited, but IMDB identifies that Elmer A. Johnson and Raymond Lindsay worked on the effects, along with electrical gadgets provided by Kenneth Strickfaden.  The "vanishing ray" device is especially memorable, surrounding the wearer in a dark shadow before fading them away into nothingness.  Walter Miller, the film's villain, who also is secretly the father of Ince's character, who tries to get him to reform, isn't one of the great serial foes, and the serial would have been better enhanced by the presence of a music score, but for me this was a worthwhile find, on par with the better serials of the era.